Things are okay -- I'm on vacation!

This vacation has been a very restful one, which is a welcome treat after dealing with all the effort involved with moving and getting rid of my old stuff.  It's been nice to just spend a lot of time sleeping and lazing about, doing not that much of all.  I can tell that it's left me a bit refreshed and ready to tackle all of the normal day to day things in my life.

I felt like playing through something new on the airplane, so I decided to play through Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow for the GBA.  The game as a whole feels very familiar after Symphony of the Night, though a little less enjoyable; perhaps simply due to being a GBA game instead of a playstation game, perhaps simply because it wasn't as novel an experience, and perhaps because it simply wasn't as large of a game (?).  It was nevertheless enjoyable while it lasted; and the ability to equip different "souls" was a nice little addition.

I held a livestream event for my indie game, Rhythm Quest!  This was part of Steam's "Next Fest" event, which apparently is something for highlighting upcoming games with free demos and livestreams.  The livestream itself went ok (besides the fact that I put in the wrong date for the schedule, whoops), though honestly it felt like most of the audience were already invested in the game.  Still, a lot more people seem to have found the game through Next Fest itself (separate from the livestream), which is great; this is the biggest uptick in wishlist count that I've seen since putting the game onto Steam, so yay.  I'm lamenting my lack of concrete and regular progress on the game over the past month+, but I'll be back at it in time (and if I'm not, then more drastic measures will have to be implemented).

I realized midway through my vacation that October is already a third of the way over and I had forgotten to start work on my Christmas letters for the year =(.  It's probably just as well though, I think this ended up being a good timing to start work on them.  I'll probably just extend my deadline past Oct 31 for this year while still making sure to keep on top of them as best as I can.

I'm obviously playing rando a lot less often than when I was competing in the GMP mentor tourney, but I still play here and there, trying to keep my skills fresh as well as just having fun with seeds here and there.  I've been trying my hand at more SMZ3 seeds, but doing SM hard logic has been a pain in the butt for me lately, requiring silly hell runs through upper norfair and getting me into bad scenarios where I repeatedly die in SM.  There's probably just a few specific things I'm really going to have to grind (Norfair hell runs, avoiding some softlocks, and of course Phantoon)...

In the meantime, I've started a playthrough of Caesar 3 on Very Hard difficulty, this time using the newest version of the "Augustus" mod.  I'm only on mission 4 so far and things are already getting quite tough!  I feel like Very Hard really stresses things more than Hard from what I remember of my last playthrough; you need more temples to appease the gods, the citizens are seemingly always unhappy, desirability and entertainment requirements for housing development are higher, and money is tighter than ever.  Thankfully, the military attacks don't seem to pose too much of a threat so far, since I have my hands full trying to plan out my city blocks well.  Unemployment in particular seems to be a nasty thorn in my side at later stages of the mission, so I'm going to have a go at trying to design housing blocks with either more services (doubling up on temples?) or less houses, or both.  Of course, all of those workers also demand wages, so managing the economy is going to be crucial -- trade exports make up almost all of your income in the early stages, but those are limited per year, so I'm going to have to make sure to build up a good cash buffer in order to transition towards using taxes as the main income sustaining cashflow source....we'll see how it all works out!

Like I said in the beginning, I'm feeling relatively good about things -- excited about both work and play.  It's a nice feeling to have.